Museums On Black Culture
This is a menu of the topics on this page (click on any):
''All the major players are represented here, but our one exhibition room
isn't big enough to show even a fraction of what we have,'' said Mora J.
Beauchamp-Byrd, the curator of the collection at Tulane's Amistad Research
Center. ''This work deserves to be seen and appreciated, and it's really very
frustrating that we don't have the space to show it.''
Across town, the Black Arts National Diaspora Museum houses another rich
collection. But during one recent week the museum was closed much of the time,
with grates on the door and windows and apparently no one inside.
''That's because we're on the first floor in a bad neighborhood, and we have
treasures,'' said Jeannette Hodge, the museum's director. The museum also lacks
the staff and resources that would allow it to remain open as regularly as she
would like.
In the historic Treme neighborhood, near the French Quarter, government urban
renewal funds were used several years ago to buy four 19th-century wooden
buildings that are now home to the New Orleans African-American Museum of Art,
Culture and History. But the museum has little parking and no bus turnaround
space and is not in a well-traveled area. Its budget is so small that there are
only three professional staff members.
An hour's drive from New Orleans, near Gonzales, La., an old plantation town,
a woman named Kathe Hambrick has opened a one-room museum dedicated to the
history of African slavery in the United States. Ms. Hambrick has great plans,
but at the moment she relies on student volunteers and an annual budget of just
$100,000.
The challenges facing these institutions reflect those at African-American
museums across the country. Even in New Orleans, which has an extraordinarily
rich African-American tradition and where the majority of the population is
black, such museums are struggling.
Nonetheless, there are far more museums concentrating on African-American
culture and history than there were a few decades ago. As recently as 1970 only
a handful existed across the country. Today there are hundreds. Some, like the
Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History in Detroit and the
African-American Museum in Dallas, are run by highly qualified administrators
and have big ambitions. Many others face a host of obstacles as they seek to
evolve from modest semiprofessional institutions into serious and broadly
appealing ones.
''It's not so easy,'' said Lowery Sims, director of the Studio Museum in
Harlem. ''We're the only African-American museum that is accredited by the
American Association of Museums. Other institutions that want to get to that
level need to have a certain quality of collection, good storage facilities and
staff to deal with the collection, bring in exhibitions on a regular basis and
raise money.
''We also have the advantage of an institutional structure and a strong board
of directors. You need that to rise out of the situation where it's an
individual who decides the fate of the museum.''
Many curators at African-American museums combine art and history, saying
that much of the black experience can be told through the visual arts.
''When a group of people cannot preserve their history in books for one
reason or another, they use oral history and art,'' said Antoinette Wright,
director of the DuSable Museum of African-American History in Chicago. ''The
African tradition of recorded history is completely bound up with the visual
arts, and we haven't moved away from that.''
Ms. Wright said that the DuSable Museum, like many other African-American
institutions, considered its mission to be social as well as educational.
''In the face of so much negativity, our people, especially young people,
need to see positive images,'' she said. ''We get kids in here who have been
told all their lives that they're going to wind up in prison. When they see our
exhibit of African-American inventors, they leave with an 'I can' spirit. That
helps them move away from distorted images that were created for us.''
''This whole museum movement really just started in the early 1990's, and
it's a thrill to see that more and more cities are deciding that they want
something like this.'' she continued. ''We're just beginning to record our
history. I'm looking forward to the day when we'll have the resources and the
public interest that's been devoted to Holocaust museums. Then we'll really be
able to preserve and convey our experience as a people.''
The DuSable Museum has an annual budget of $2.7 million. That is among the
highest of any African-American museum, but it pales before the budgets of major
national museums. This year, for example, the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum's in Washington is $55.7 million, more than half of which comes from
federal funds.
Although curators at African-American museums say that many of their appeals
to wealthy blacks fall on deaf ears, some celebrities do contribute. Among those
who have donated to various museums are Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover,
Bill Cosby and Billy Dee Williams, himself a painter.
Curators also complain about a lack of corporate support, but there are
striking exceptions. The General Motors Foundation recently gave $5 million for
the establishment of an African-American art center in Detroit, and Proctor
& Gamble has donated $6 million to a new museum in Cincinnati that is to
document the history of the Underground Railroad.
Planning for the Cincinnati museum, which is not expected to open until 2004,
has been under way for five years. Officials there said they were acutely aware
of how many African-American museums had stumbled or failed because they were
founded with more enthusiasm than savvy.
Rita Organ, the director of exhibits and collections at the embryonic
Cincinnati museum, is also president of the Association of African-American
Museums, which has more than 200 members. Several hundred museums devoted to
aspects of the African-American experience, many of them in storefronts or
single rooms, do not belong.
Ms. Organ said that in addition to coping with low funds and lack of
professional expertise, such museums must deal carefully with political
sensitivities.
''Telling African-American history can often offend donors if they feel that
the history isn't the truth or places a particular person or group of people in
a bad light,'' she said. ''If it is perceived that our museums are becoming
corporately run, then the community can often respond negatively, and this shows
in attendance figures. On the flip side, if a corporation sees that there is no
community support, it may be reluctant to give.''
In February, which for 25 years has been designated Black History Month, many
institutions across the country offer special programs and exhibitions
documenting the African-American experience. This year's range from a
photography exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago to
re-creations of slave life at George Washington's estate in Mount Vernon, Va.
Throughout the year, museums that have large collections of African-American
art but not enough space to display them often send their works on tour or lend
them to other institutions. Last fall, for example, six historically black
colleges and universities selected outstanding works from their collections,
combined them into a single exhibition and arranged for it to be shown at Duke
University.
Occasionally, private collectors of African-American art donate works to
universities or other institutions that seem able to catalog and display them.
Recently, for example, Paul R. Jones, who worked for a number of government
civil rights programs, donated his collection of more than 1,000 works to the
University of Delaware.
The collection at the Amistad Research Center includes works by many of the
most celebrated African-American artists, including acknowledged masters like
Henry O. Tanner, Edward Mitchell Bannister and Jacob Lawrence. Its most popular
work, judging from the number of requests that the center receives for
permission to reproduce it on notecards and posters, as well as in art history
textbooks, is Ellis Wilson's colorful and stylized ''Funeral Procession.'' It is
among the best-known images in African-American art, but most of the time it
sits unseen in the Amistad's storeroom.
''We want to show our art, which we can hardly do now, and we also want to
contextualize it, because in our community, art and history really do overlap,''
Ms. Beauchamp-Byrd said. ''Institutions like ours have to do this because
mainstream museums are not presenting these artists' work. Our artists have not
been on a level playing field with others who are not of color.''
Many specialists in African-American history are frustrated that there is no
single museum or center in the United States that comprehensively documents the
institution of slavery, the root of the black experience in this country. Some,
however, like the Anacostia Museum and Center for African-American History and
Culture in Washington, display artifacts of slave life.
''In our society we're used to looking at museums as places where we see the
best of ourselves,'' said Steven Newsome, the Anacostia's director. ''The
subject of slavery runs against that expectation. There have been a few efforts
to confront this subject, but all of us need to do a better job of it. It's a
question that will continue to arise, and at some point, it's going to have to
be dealt with.''
Mr. Newsome, like some of his colleagues, believes that it may be best for a
museum or museums of slavery to be located in the South. The River Road
African-American Museum and Gallery, which Ms. Hambrick opened in 1994, is a
modest effort to begin such an institution.
Ms. Hambrick was born in Louisiana but left as a teenager, vowing never to
return to what she considered a hateful part of the country, filled with visible
and invisible reminders of overwhelming brutality.
''When I finally did come back, something told me to take one of these
plantation tours,'' she said. ''I wound up taking them all, and I was very
disturbed and upset that there was no mention of slavery at all. One guide even
talked about servants. That's when I decided that this story has to be told.''
With no experience or training in the field, Ms. Hambrick persuaded the
owners of one plantation to give her a vacant cabin, which now houses her
museum. Its exhibits range from a cotton sack to a sign that reads ''Colored
Served in Rear.''
Ms. Hambrick is now seeking $2.5 million in grants to buy an original slave
cabin, present art and history exhibitions and build a sculpture garden.
''This is our Auschwitz,'' Ms. Hambrick said. ''We need to learn about what
happened, confront it and educate people about something a lot of them are only
vaguely aware of. We've been so caught up in civil rights, fighting poverty and
trying to reduce crime that we haven't had time to think about preserving our
culture. If we can start doing that, we'll build our self-esteem in ways that
will really be good for America.''
Organizations mentioned in this article:
Related Terms:
You may print this article now, or save it on your computer for future reference. Instructions for saving this article on your computer are also available.
Page Top